How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

How Knowledge Moves

How Knowledge Moves

Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

EDITED BY JOHN KRIGE

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60585-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60599-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60604-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226606040.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krige, John, editor.

Title: How knowledge moves : writing the transnational history of science and technology / edited by John Krige.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018027426 | ISBN 9780226605852 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226605999 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226606040 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology transfer—United States—History—20th century. | Science—United States—International cooperation—History—20th century. | Technology transfer—Cross-cultural studies. | Science—International cooperation—Cross-cultural studies.

Classification: LCC T174.3.H69 2019 | DDC 303.48/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027426

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

John Krige

PART I  The US Regulatory State

CHAPTER 1  Restricting the Transnational Movement of Knowledgeable Bodies: The Interplay of US Visa Restrictions and Export Controls in the Cold War

Mario Daniels

CHAPTER 2  Export Controls as Instruments to Regulate Knowledge Acquisition in a Globalizing Economy

John Krige

PART II  Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

CHAPTER 3  California Cloning in French Algeria: Rooting Pieds Noirs and Uprooting Fellahs in the Orange Groves of the Mitidja

Tiago Saraiva

CHAPTER 4  Modalities of Modernization: American Technic in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Prakash Kumar

CHAPTER 5  Transnational Knowledge, American Hegemony: Social Scientists in US-Occupied Japan

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia

CHAPTER 6  Dispersed Sites: San Marco and the Launch from Kenya

Asif Siddiqi

CHAPTER 7  Bringing the Environment Back In: A Transnational History of Landsat

Neil M. Maher

PART III  Individual Identities in Flux

CHAPTER 8  Manuel Sandoval Vallarta: The Rise and Fall of a Transnational Actor at the Crossroad of World War II Science Mobilization

Adriana Minor

CHAPTER 9  The Officer’s Three Names: The Formal, Familiar, and Bureaucratic in the Transnational History of Scientific Fellowships

Michael J. Barany

CHAPTER 10  Scientific Exchanges between the United States and Brazil in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Diplomacy and Transnational Movements

Olival Freire Jr. and Indianara Silva

CHAPTER 11  The Transnational Physical Science Study Committee: The Evolving Nation in the World of Science and Education (1945–1975)

Josep Simon

PART IV  The Nuclear Regime

CHAPTER 12  Technical Assistance in Movement: Nuclear Knowledge Crosses Latin American Borders

Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz

CHAPTER 13  Controlled Exchanges: Public-Private Hybridity, Transnational Networking, and Knowledge Circulation in US-China Scientific Discourse on Nuclear Arms Control

Zuoyue Wang

Afterword: Reflections on Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

Michael J. Barany and John Krige

List of Contributors

Index

Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

John Krige

The transnational approach is now well established in multiple fields of academic history.¹ By decentering the nation-state as the unit of analysis, the transnational lens magnifies complex relationships of interdependency between disparate people and places that crisscross national borders. Science and technology would seem especially susceptible to such analyses, being the products of large and complex social institutions that do, at least in principle, transcend the boundaries of nations and nation-states. Yet even if the practice and circulation of (techno)science would seem to demand a transnational approach, it cannot be said that their historiography, especially of more recent times, has proved adequate to its object. The increasing investment by governments in science, technology, and development, particularly after World War II, has encouraged studies that situate scientific and technological activities and achievements almost exclusively in a national frame. This narrowing of perspective has been reinforced by having the primary archives and institutions of science and technology organized at local, regional, and national levels. The collection of essays in this book invites us instead to stand back and, rather than foregrounding local contexts, to study national actors and institutions first and foremost as nodes in transnational networks that tied people together through aspiration, expertise, and affiliation of various kinds.²

Most of the essays published here were first presented at a workshop held in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. On that occasion some two-dozen people from many parts of the world discussed the substance of their precirculated papers and reflected on how to write the transnational history of science and technology. Inspired by the possibilities of a transnational approach as a perspective rather than a clear-cut method, but aware of the many rich seams that it opens up to inquiry, we sought to capture its specificity when scientific and technological knowledge in its many modes of being was the object of inquiry.³ James Secord has suggested that the central question of the history of science is How and why does knowledge circulate?⁴ This is obviously one of the central questions of the history of technology too, at least if we understand technology not simply as an artifact but as a form of knowledge, including tacit know-how, that is embedded in material objects and practices that are designed to transform the world around us.⁵ By emphasizing the transnational dimension of how and why knowledge circulates across borders, we fused a central question of the history of science and technology with an important new approach being espoused by many other kinds of historians without diffusing our object or unduly blurring its contribution to a transnational agenda.

The scientific and technological knowledge that flows from one node to another in a network can take many forms, is mobilized in diverse social and institutional settings, and transforms social relationships on different scales. It can be tacit or propositional, cutting-edge or mundane. It is expressed in multiple practices—experimental, educational, managerial, policy oriented—as well as in modes of control and domination. It engages universities and corporations, missionaries and philanthropic foundations, national governments as well as regional and international organizations.

Knowledge, as information, as expertise, as know-how, crosses borders in many ways—in written or printed form (books, including textbooks and manuals, letters, newspapers, academic publications, technical reports, blueprints, trade journals) or embedded in devices (like an inertial guidance system) as well as in living things (like human beings and cloned animals). The international circulation of knowledge made possible today by sophisticated communications technologies gives the impression that—proprietary and classified knowledge apart—knowledge simply moves across borders without friction in a flat networked world. The essays in this volume take a very different position. They problematize circulation itself. They emphasize the social and material constraints that impede the movement of knowledge across borders. They pay attention to the material culture, to the mundane practices, and to the local and national resources that have to be mobilized to build and to maintain transnational networks that bind together social actors with a commitment to producing and sharing scientific and technological knowledge. They share Charles Bright and Michael Geyer’s concern that much writing on globalization tends to presume the (relative) openness of the world rather than analyzing the structured networks and webs through which interconnections are made and maintained—as well as contested and renegotiated.⁶ They are a response to Chris Bayly’s injunction to grapple with the problem of modeling the element of power into the concept of circulation.⁷

This volume deals with transnational encounters during the long twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the period after 1945. The specificity of this periodization for the transnational history of knowledge circulation lies in the increasing centrality of science and technology to the economic, political, and military strength of the modern state. In 1945 scientific discovery and technological innovation moved to the heart of the political process. Beginning in the 1960s countries came to be judged by the percentage of their gross national products dedicated to research and development. This new official metric of national achievement was embedded in a geopolitical context that pitted Western democracies against communist rivals, while the global order was transformed by the process of decolonization. The United Nations was established in 1945 with 51 sovereign member states; by 1966 it had 122. The state cannot but be a central actor—whose role needs to be unraveled—in a transnational history of knowledge flows in the twentieth century. More specifically, the United States, as the world’s leading scientific and technological power for the first twenty-five years after the end of World War II, if not before, and with long-standing aspirations to build a democratic world order, cannot but be implicated in the construction of transnational networks on a global scale. Michael McGerr is surely right to suggest, with a touch of irony, that [t]ransnationalism may well be a form of imperialism; the transnational world may well emerge from such unlovely phenomena as American power and American exceptionalism.⁸ Correlatively, the essays here provide a benchmark, a point of reference for studies that engage other periods of time and other regions of the world, studies that adopt space-time frames in which the relationship between scientific and technological knowledge and the state took different forms, and when the movement of such knowledge across borders was subject to different modes of control from different centers of power.

This volume specifically directs attention to the processes shaping knowledge flows when national borders matter. It deals with situations in which an analysis of knowledge-in-movement cannot ignore its value as a national resource. When national power and sovereignty are entangled with access to and control over knowledge in its multiple forms and when scientific and technological prowess are markers of national achievement (Michael Adas) and legibility is of cardinal importance for governance (James C. Scott)—two key inheritances from nineteenth-century rationalism—states will affirm their right to regulate the circulation of knowledge.⁹ The ideology of globalization celebrates deregulation, privatization, and individual gratification via access to free markets, reducing the state to the role of facilitator. A transnational history of knowledge as developed here treats knowledge not as a commodity to be bought and sold but as a resource to be nurtured and protected. It is a resource whose full value is thrown into relief when we track its trajectory beyond the national frame—more precisely, when we follow knowledge and its bearers as they chart their way through the complex apparatus put in place in the name of national sovereignty to control their passage beyond borders.

Five main ideas inform the analysis that follows: the centrality of travel, the role of the regulatory state, the meaning of borders and networks, the significance of nationality and political allegiance, and the intersection between the local and the global. Their pertinence is fleshed out in the individual essays that make up this volume, each of which is briefly introduced in the second section of the introduction. Collectively these essays make a strong statement for the novelty and importance of a transnational approach to the circulation of scientific and technological knowledge, a way of seeing that reveals new, unexpected, and previously occluded dimensions of the social world.

The Centrality of Travel How are we to characterize the movement of knowledge across borders? Workshop participants were critical of popular metaphors like circulation and flow and of Emily Rosenberg’s use of the term currents, in analogy to the flow of electricity, to describe this movement.¹⁰ The term currents plays down the role of human agency and intentionality and lacks the sense of purpose that is crucial to plotting the paths mapped out by knowledge itineraries. It may capture the movement of disembodied information or knowledge that encircles the globe with modern communications technologies, but it skips over the rough terrain and multilayered interactions that are constitutive of the transnational moments described here. Circulation also implies a looping back that often does not happen in a transnational context, where knowledge vectors can be unidirectional or zigzag haphazardly across multiple borders.

To avoid these pitfalls, this volume treats the movement of knowledge embodied in people (and things) as a social accomplishment. It pays special attention to travel across borders, putting human individuals and their motivations for going abroad and for engaging with and transforming (and being transformed by) others in a foreign place at the core of the analysis.¹¹ Travel requires funds, which are usually secured from institutional patrons, be they local, national, regional, or international, that in turn have their own motives for supporting the transnational movement of knowledge. It also requires documents—passports, visas, export licenses—that authorize one to move abroad with one’s knowledge. Travel calls forth a vast bureaucratic apparatus and leaves a paper trail that documents every move of the subject, a trail that reveals the contingency of border crossings, of which most travelers are often not even aware. Unraveling how travel is possible exposes the internal negotiations between travelers and/or their patrons and the departments and agencies of the regulatory state that require that certain conditions be met before people can move abroad freely with their knowledge (from the mundane, like travel documents, to the contentious, like an acceptable political stance, to the detailed, like where you can go and whom you can visit without jeopardizing national security or economic competitiveness). It is in these piles of paperwork that states perform their sovereignty. Travel also involves engaging with and adjusting to people of different cultures working in institutional contexts that are shaped by unfamiliar norms and who oppose the arrival of disruptive knowledge from abroad. Thinking of movement as a social achievement foregrounds the contingency and the labor required for scientific and technological knowledge and knowledgeable bodies (to use Mario Daniels’s happy phrase—see chapter 1) to cross borders.

The movement of knowledge from one site to another is sometimes theorized using a linear model of transfer that sees production followed by circulation, followed by selective adaption by local actors at the receiving end. The epistemological hubris that underpins this center-periphery model, itself an echo of Cold War modernization theory, has been discredited by studies that emphasize the local specificity of knowledge production, wherever it may occur. Networks that bind together diverse sites of knowledge production, and that build communities that reciprocally share standardized knowledge, provide a richer account of the global production and circulation of knowledge than the hub-and-spoke representation of center and periphery.¹² Kapil Raj goes further in his study of the transnational sharing of knowledge between British officials and indigenous cognoscenti in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India.¹³ He stresses the importance of face-to-face contact as a site of engagement, transformation, and knowledge coproduction for all parties engaged in the transaction, a transaction, it should be stressed, made possible by travel along imperial sea routes. Raj highlights the mutable nature of knowledge-makers themselves, as much as of the knowledges and skills that they embodied, their transformations and reconfigurations in the course of their geographical and social displacements.¹⁴ Face-to-face encounters in which transnational social actors dissolve borders are dynamic engagements in which both formal propositional and tacit craft knowledge are exchanged between social actors. They can also be unsettling, transformative experiences, occurring in unfamiliar places and dominated by asymmetric power relations. By going beyond the level of networks, and by digging down to the microlevel of interpersonal exchanges made possible by travel, several chapters in this volume throw light on the tensions, misunderstandings, and conflicts—as well as the productive encounters—that constitute transnational knowledge formation.

The Role of the Regulatory State The transnational approach effaces the national container as the unit of analysis. However, as the previous paragraph implies, it is one thing for a historian to break the national frame so as to allow movement across borders to come into view. It is another for a transnational actor to do so in practice. Movement across national (or regional) borders injects the regulatory state back into the core of transnational history. This is tragically evident from the dramatic plight of refugees fleeing war zones in Europe and from the anxiety felt by citizens of countries recently targeted in an unexpected executive order by the American president in January 2017. Cross-border movement is regulated by policies of inclusion and exclusion and is controlled using a variety of instruments, from the pen to the sword. Regulating the flow of knowledge during the Cold War, in particular, required striking a balance between local practitioners acquiring the information brought into the country by a foreign national and the risks to national security and economic competitiveness of the presence of a foreign national on local soil. Ideologies claiming that knowledge circulates freely in a world that is flat forget the restrictions placed by free world governments on the movement of communist and left-leaning scientists during the Cold War. They ignore the near-total prohibition of knowledge sharing with some countries (like North Korea) and with researchers from certain military-centered research institutions in China today. They also ignore the gray area of sensitive but unclassified knowledge that is controlled by an array of regulatory regimes that selectively discriminate against some countries, firms, and individuals, and whose boundaries are constantly (re)negotiated as the cutting edge of knowledge shifts within an existing field or carves open entirely new fields of inquiry.¹⁵

Akira Iriye has stressed the new insights that became available when international history relinquished its emphasis on formal relationships between states and explored transnational phenomena produced by nonstate actors.¹⁶ In this volume the boundaries between state and nonstate actors are blurred. Diplomacy and high politics are indeed at one remove from the day-to-day activities of the regulatory state that permeates transnational lives. But they do impinge on those activities by establishing, at an interstate level, the regulatory framework that sets the terms for transnational movement. Within that framework the transnational actors we discuss, while usually not having explicit roles as representatives of their governments, do have a variety of relationships to the state other than being anonymous desk officers who authorize cross-border movement. Trained scientists and engineers are a national asset, and their advanced knowledge is a resource that readily serves as an instrument of soft power, thus blurring their nonstate identity. Some capitalized on state-driven projects that valued their specific skills to promote American values abroad. Some exploited friendly relationships between governments to advance their national research agendas. Some took advantage of their close ties with officials of the regulatory state to expedite the travel of people they were sponsoring. The central point to bear in mind is that the association of knowledge with power—power to transform nature and the social world—unwittingly or otherwise engages nonstate actors with national governments that compete with one another across a spectrum of activities.

Borders and Networks What is a border, or a national frontier? Charles Maier writes, A frontier is partially a virtual construction. It is as much a site of the demonstrative extent of power as a real barrier. . . . [T]he frontier defines authority, and those who govern lose legitimacy if their frontiers become totally permeable.¹⁷ This conception of frontier refers to more than the geographically bounded limits to the territory of the nation-state. National borders need not be material nor are they policed only at physical customs and immigration posts. Border crossings can occur when foreign nationals attend a trade show, are present in a lecture theater or a laboratory, or are trained in the use of sophisticated equipment that is dual-use, civilian and military. Transnational boundaries can even be embedded within sensitive technological devices (like gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment) by denying foreign nationals access to some of the knowledge constitutive of them without permission.¹⁸ Boundary work is constitutive of borders.

The legal apparatus of regulatory states produces taxonomies that discriminate between people and knowledge that can travel unhindered across borders and those that require authorization (a visa, an export license, . . .) on pain of sanction. These taxonomic grids are contingent responses to emerging political situations in which the state demonstrates its power by erecting barriers to free movement. Historically states have always taken measures to protect knowledge, and the movement of knowledgeable people, on which their power depends.¹⁹ What sets the period covered by this volume apart is the centrality of the production and circulation of knowledge to the consolidation and projection of state power. This is the geopolitical context in which, immediately after World War II, the entire system of classification was reinforced by the apparatus of the national security state to control the free circulation of sensitive knowledge. In which visa policies evolved in the 1950s to target the cross-border movement of knowledgeable bodies. In which export controls were expanded to regulate the circulation of sensitive but unclassified technical data and information. In which the distinction between basic and applied science was developed, in consultation with leading members of the American research community, to create a space for the transnational circulation of basic knowledge while legitimizing tighter controls on socially useful products and processes (applied science)—the context in which basic science was internationalized, while applied science was nationalized.

In commenting on his magisterial new book on territoriality, Charles Maier recently wondered whether the emancipation of information from local constraints in the digital age herald[s] a post-territorial dispensation or whether national authorities [will] manage to control data and communication, whether through traditional sovereign claims or new technologies. This is too quick. Let us not be deluded by two billion active Facebook users into thinking that local constraints on knowledge flows are being dissolved by communications technologies that circle the globe, or that states can do little more than have recourse to sovereignty or surveillance to reassert their control over the circulation of data. On the contrary. Several chapters in this volume highlight the range of instruments that national governments, notably the United States, have devised to regulate the flow of knowledge across borders, some of them epistemic (fundamental research vs. proprietary or industrial research), some enshrined in legal regimes (export controls), some flowing from international agreements (Atoms for Peace), some built into the structure of patronage (classification). They remind us of the determination by states to coconstruct national systems of knowledge production and the regulatory regimes needed to control the circulation of knowledge within and across borders. These efforts may eventually fail or at least be reconfigured in response to the emergence and domination of an international system subtended by privatization and deregulation. Their contingency apart, today they still testify to the enduring importance of territoriality, as Maier emphasizes.²⁰

Transnational networks connect remote places where knowledge is produced, exchanged, and appropriated. They do not respect borders. It is common practice, but misleading, to think of them simply as links that can be represented by lines drawn on a two-dimensional map. The world, as Frederick Cooper puts it, is a space where economic and political relations are very uneven; it is full of lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, places where social relations become dense amid others that are diffuse.²¹ Global inequalities in the production and appropriation of science and technology demand that we imagine networks as lumpy, three-dimensional structures made up of hierarchical interpersonal encounters. Transnational actors do not simply travel from one place to another; their knowledge is an asset that they deploy to reconfigure existing spaces and themselves and what they know. Correlatively, networks are not rigid struts but dynamic relationships that evolve over time and that persist only as long as the networked participants reap some benefit from them. Neither the links nor the nodes in a conventionally understood network can, in the perspective developed in this volume, be taken for granted as unproblematic foundations for historical analysis.

Reciprocity, a sense of mutual advantage, is a sine qua non for ongoing and successful participation in a network. The possibility of sharing knowledge is obviously an important motivation for establishing a network linking researchers at different places. But it is not the only, or even the most important, reason for the transnational knowledge flows discussed in this volume. The reciprocity that maintains the engagement of actors in networks need not be measured only in terms of the knowledge that is shared. For governments, for example, transnational links can also serve as instruments of foreign policy and of economic and cultural hegemony, they can be intrinsic to building a regional federated system of states, they can help establish footholds in an indigenous community, they can provide access to resources not available at home, and so on. Though the chapters in this volume highlight the transnational movement of science and technology as the object of analysis, they recognize that stakeholders have many other—though related—motives for building transnational networks. These too are factored into stakeholders’ calculations of reciprocity and into their assessments of why it is worth investing time, money, and resources in building and maintaining transnational networks.

The American-led project to modernize countries casting off the yoke of colonialism in the 1950s exemplifies the multiple dimensions of reciprocity built on the scaffolding of the transnational movement of knowledge. The asymmetry in knowledge/power between the industrialized North and the not-yet-modern South provided an opportunity for scholars, foundations, and various branches of the government to refashion the structure of societies and the identities of elites and peasants alike in line with American models of social organization, individual mobility, political process, and democratic values. Point IV of President Truman’s inaugural speech in January 1949 pledged to use America’s scientific advances, industrial progress, and imponderable resources in technological knowledge for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.²² In a stroke Truman collapsed the complex histories and diverse social structures of a multitude of countries struggling toward sovereignty into a one-dimensional lack, a generalized absence amenable to a single solution: American-led modernization. He also legitimated a discourse, the language of development, that provided a policy goal that all could share. It fused the local aspirations of fractions of local, national elites with the global ambitions of liberal internationalists in the industrialized powers. The telos of development was not tarnished by the presumption of superiority that had inspired the civilizing mission embarked on by the European imperialist powers: We don’t do empire, as Donald Rumsfeld (George Bush II’s secretary of defense) famously proclaimed to a reporter from the TV channel Al-Jazeera.²³ Helping underdeveloped countries climb the technological ladder through successive stages of economic growth was denuded of political overtones by mobilizing objective science and technology in multiple fields of the natural and social sciences in pursuit of the benign goal of human improvement.²⁴

Modernizing knowledge flowed out under the auspices of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the State Department and other branches of the government, transported by traveling expert consultants and teachers in economics, in agriculture, in demography, in physics and engineering, and in social planning. New knowledges were implanted by formal training (e.g., in dedicated courses in nuclear engineering in American universities, in experimental farms in India, in standardized physics textbooks in Latin America), by demonstration (development . . . suddenly came down to a very simple proposition: one man seeing his neighbor doing better than he was doing), by deploying economic incentives supplemented by force (e.g., in human sterilization programs in India).²⁵ In a reciprocal movement knowledge flowed back to central sites of power, where it was processed by teams of researchers, was published in international journals, boosted individual careers, and secured further funding for a variety of academic programs that enhanced the asymmetries of knowledge and power they were supposed to erode.²⁶

Transnational actors refashion the local sites at which they put their knowledge to work and are refashioned themselves. This refashioning empowers some, disadvantages others, creates new opportunities for those who are included in their transformative projects, and marginalizes those who are excluded or who oppose those projects. In imperial or neocolonial contexts the engagement occurs in what Mary Louise Pratt calls contact zones, social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.²⁷ When the external intersects with the local in an asymmetric relationship of knowledge/power, it can disrupt existing social relations, destroy local knowledge and traditions, and transform a backwater into a center of knowledge production in the global political economy of knowledge creation and distribution. A transnational history of the movement of science and technology across borders changes our perception of where knowledge is produced, creating new maps of innovation and use that put multiple nodes in a network in sometimes unexpected relationships with one another.

Nationality and Political Allegiance Transnational history tends to celebrate the fluid, hybrid identities assumed by people who are transformed by their engagements with different cultures and ways of life. States are uneasy with such ambiguity, however, and go to great lengths to define the national identity (and political allegiance, or loyalty) of those who are engaged in the production and circulation of knowledge across borders. The successful functioning of the regulatory apparatus requires nothing less: as stressed above, knowledge is deemed to have crossed a border whenever it is exchanged between people of different nationalities. Such reasoning presumes that foreign nationals’ primary allegiance will always be to their home countries, so that they can serve as conduits through which sensitive knowledge can be leaked abroad. Nationality is fluid only in the sense that it has no essence, no single meaning in the lifeworld of a transnational actor. Transnational subjectivities are blurred hybrids that dilute national identity; they are lived ambiguities that are incompatible with the legibility sought after, and imposed, by the bureaucratic state system. Fixed in taxonomic grids on an official document, if not in stone, nationality serves as a social category of inclusion or exclusion that can be used to gain or to deny access to the benefits that come from being formally recognized as a citizen.

The ideology of scientific internationalism brackets off nationality. Historically the members of the research community defined their identity as one that was committed to the collective pursuit of objective truth, to the discovery of facts about the world that provided a solid foundation for convergence and agreement among different inquirers irrespective of their race, gender, and religious or political persuasions. Their loyalty to universal science transcended the concerns of nation, and they decried attempts to impede the international circulation of knowledge by state intervention (except in times of war). There are contemporary expressions of this legacy in the construction of multiple modes of international scientific and technological collaboration. These are also contemporary expressions of Robert Merton’s ethos of science as expressed in the norm of universalism—that is, the view that the scientific community disregards the race, nationality, culture, and gender of a participant when assessing the validity of truth-claims.²⁸

The scope of the international is bounded.²⁹ The high profile enjoyed in academia by scientific internationalism obscures the collaborations that are controlled for national or ideological reasons, the papers that cannot be shared, the self-censorship that places constraints on what can be said, the countries and their nationals that are not admitted to the international conference in the first place. It is trivial to note that for every Mertonian norm we find a counternorm in practice.³⁰ It is equally trivial to reduce to a counternorm the invocation of socially constructed criteria of identity that exclude individuals from transnational networks. Scientific internationalism is polyvalent. It helps structure a community of scholars committed to sharing knowledge across borders. It serves as a source of solidarity among them in the face of nationalistically aggressive political regimes. And it is a malleable ideology that concedes that the knowledge/power nexus demands that the scope of the international circulation of knowledge be restricted to those whose nationality or political allegiance is not deemed to threaten state interests.

The international circulation of knowledge in journals, workshops, and conferences does not mean that nationality and political allegiance are irrelevant analytical categories in a transnational study of scientific exchanges. It simply indicates that the transnational transaction in question was constructed around knowledge that was not deemed by the regulatory state to undermine national security or economic competitiveness, and that it was shared between protagonists whose loyalty to any political or ideological creed was deemed to be irrelevant.³¹ Controlled movement and the free circulation of knowledge are coconstructed spheres whose limits are defined and enforced by the state apparatus. Knowledge is a national resource, and the art of statecraft lies in defining policies and instruments that help draw the line between what kind of knowledge will be shared with (or denied to) whom.³² The willingness of the research community to deny knowledge to others on the grounds of national or political allegiance is indicative of their internalization of the values of a national regulatory regime that imposes boundaries beyond which knowledge may not flow freely. There is a price to pay for patronage.

The Local and the Global Transnational actors forge ties between the microlevel of personal biography, a local context that places a premium on international travel, the national level as defined by the regulatory state, and the global as constituted by the multiple sites where they alight as they and their knowledge travel from one country to another. These different scales at which transnational movement is performed are loosely coupled with one another: loosely because contingently, because the threads that tie them together to constitute a network can be snapped by unexpected and unplanned-for developments that can occur at any of the levels. These can be relatively mundane, like disputes between collaborating individuals; relatively frequent, like the loss of funding; and totally disruptive, like a major change in travel regulations or the outbreak of war. The transnational movement of knowledge flourishes in a context in which its advantages are valued and its practices embedded in institutional goals that can resist the storms that buffet the movement of ideas, people, and things across borders.

The transnational encounter is facilitated by the standardization of knowledge-producing practices in a network. Standardization is both a practical advantage and an epistemological condition for sustained transnational transactions. The coproduction of knowledge at multiple local sites requires a collective commitment to standardized equipment and the acquisition of standardized protocols, techniques, and disciplined procedures to use and manipulate it effectively. It is standardization that closes the gap between local and universal scientific and technological knowledge.³³ Understanding how reliable knowledge is produced in (transnational) networks involves understanding movement: of people, things, ‘languages’ and techniques.³⁴ Together they define best practice, ways of doing that are required to domesticate the capriciousness of equipment and the recalcitrance of nature and of social facts.

The interpenetration of the local and the global has been facilitated by the use of English as the lingua franca in scientific and technological exchanges the world over. This coupling has not taken place of its own accord. It was not an inevitable consequence of the development of communications technologies that linked living rooms in the industrialized West with remote villages in China or command and control centers in Colorado with battlefields in Afghanistan. On the contrary, as Michael Gordin has argued, one major consequence of Cold War rivalry was the hegemony of English and its role in constructing transnational research communities—a development that has been contested, of course.³⁵ Once the Eisenhower administration grasped the extent of Soviet scientific and technological capabilities, it actively promoted the use of English among its allies in Europe in the hope of efficiently pooling advanced knowledge to maintain leadership. It also embarked on a major program to translate Soviet scientific and technological literature into English. Janet Martin-Nielsen estimates that the US military injected over $20 million into machine translation between the end of World War II and 1965, one of the first major uses of computers for nonnumerical tasks.³⁶ The National Defense Education Act of 1958 singled out three areas of strategic importance in the face of the communist threat: mathematics, science, and, third, foreign languages. In what was called a war for men’s minds, Martin-Nielsen tells us, language and linguistics formed a critical element of the rise of American leadership in the new world order, contributing to the Anglicization not only of science and international affairs but more generally of global business practices and of culture.³⁷

The promotion of English as a lingua franca has been complemented by the global expansion of local and national education and training programs that have helped standardize the communicative practices that are central to building transnational knowledge communities. The dissemination of nuclear science and technology in the 1950s, especially to developing countries, was an early exemplar of this process in a sensitive field. It helped kick-start indigenous nuclear programs envisioned by people like Homi Bhabha, who combined his immense scientific and political talent with a vision of the future that saw nuclear power too-cheap-to-meter as lifting India’s standard of living up to that of America’s.³⁸ The US Atomic Energy Commission provided nuclear materials. Fledgling nuclear engineering programs at North Carolina State, Penn State, MIT, and other universities provided demanding, hands-on training for the scientists and engineers who would run reactors provided in the framework of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. Bill Leslie tells us that, by the time Bhabha died tragically in 1966, he had built the largest and best-funded laboratory in India, with a staff of 8,500, including 2,000 scientists and engineers. Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, could only marvel (with some trepidation) at the truly remarkable peaceful nuclear power program in India.³⁹ Today the unambiguous political and propagandistic dimension of these early initiatives to build a global nuclear community aligned with US interests has given way to far broader educational programs, particularly in STEM fields. Between 1991 and 2011 over 235,000 foreign nationals received PhDs in science and engineering in the United States, almost half of them from just three emerging economies: China, India, and South Korea.⁴⁰ Business and management courses are even more popular.⁴¹

The construction of a transnational knowledge community collides with vested local interests and their histories that resist its pressure to homogenize and to standardize. John Burnham has explained how the extreme nationalism and provincialism that divided research communities in psychiatry in the interwar period were gradually eroded after World War II. Beginning in 1950, with inflexion points around 1968 and 1980, a transnational community of publishing psychiatrists (and perhaps even practicing psychiatrists) was inadvertently constructed by the increasingly widespread use of English. This expansion was opposed in the name of national autonomy in Germany and, above all, in France, where it was criticized as American colonization or American intellectual imperialism. Such labels were an implicit acknowledgment of the leading role played by US practitioners in defining the contours of the research frontier. The locus of power/knowledge had shifted away from Europe. Now the linguistically handicapped Americans, as Burnham calls them, obliged others to publish in English to announce their innovations and to keep up to date in the field, so securing transnational visibility and awareness.⁴² American preeminence (and limited language skills) constructed a transnational community that merged distinct local components with universal, if anglophone, components. One had no choice but to communicate in English if one sought to transcend the limits of the local and to garner scientific credit, social capital, and international recognition, all of which were highly prized domestically. A working knowledge of English paved the highway from the local to the global.

The construction of a transnational community of scholars who are at ease in English, familiar with American paradigms and questions, and trained in the standardized best practices of research can be of mutual benefit. It enables scholars in the resource-rich research communities to tap comfortably into the global pool of knowledge. It enables researchers in emerging powers to work at the cutting edge of knowledge production, perhaps leapfrogging over decades of relative backwardness in their home countries. From the nation-state’s point of view, the advantage of being rapidly able to exploit the newest knowledge has to be weighed against the danger of creating one’s own competitor. There is a constant tension between the open circulation of knowledge by shared communicative practices and the pressure to restrict its circulation to protect the national interest, however that may be defined.

Before the workshop was over the participants turned what they had learned back on themselves. As Gabrielle M. Spiegel observed in her 2009 American Historical Association presidential address, one of the marks of transnational history and related new fields of inquiry was that they entailed the study of discontinuities in the experiences of, and displacements of location in, the lives of their subjects.⁴³ Was it a coincidence that the majority in our workshop had traveled extensively, had lived on several continents, had changed passports and nationality, sometimes more than once, or spoke several languages other than English? We realized that the increasing hegemony of the English language could elide the specificity of the local—but it did facilitate transnational conversations (including the one presented in this collection of essays, in which the majority of the contributions are from scholars whose first language is not English!). We recognized that most of us had a somewhat diffuse cosmopolitan identity that blurred our sense of national belonging—but it did heighten our awareness of the persistent salience of nation and state. It is often stressed that writing transnational history requires familiarity with foreign languages and archives. A transnational approach also resonates with the life experiences of a particular type of person, an individual who feels comfortable writing history from a position that is detached from any deep sense of national allegiance, an individual who lives, sometimes uneasily, in a liminal gray zone that enhances his or her critique of any form of national exceptionalism but that also exposes him or her to the fragility of being an outsider who is at once comfortable nowhere and everywhere.

The essays presented in this volume vary in scope and scale and cover transnational relations between many regions of the world. All of them deal with the long twentieth century, an era in which interimperial scientific collaboration (promoted as scientific internationalism) was disrupted by the centrifugal forces of Cold War rivalry and of decolonization that together reconfigured the global space in which transnational (techno)scientific networks were built.⁴⁴ All take the United States as one node in the transnational network, though not always the dominant or central one. It is linked southward to Latin America, and it has ties to China, India, and Japan in Asia, as well as, across the Atlantic, to Italy (and into Kenya) and French Algeria. This is not a hub-and-spoke model: the lines of movement are multidirectional, have very different points of departure, and engage many different places at a scale below the continental. Physics of various kinds, mathematics, and agriculture are heavily represented, but so too is space science and its applications and the social sciences. The range of actors includes subaltern and elite individuals, philanthropic foundations, scientific organizations, governments and government agencies, and international, not to say global, institutions. These are not case studies. They are exercises in writing the transnational history of science and technology that break with the national frame in multiple registers, sometimes quite explicitly exposing the limits of nationalist historiographies.

Part I has two chapters that describe the day-to-day workings of the regulatory state in Cold War America. In the first, Mario Daniels traces the intellectual history of US policies for policing its borders in the decade or so after World War II, focusing on the role of passports and visas as instruments to control the circulation of knowledgeable bodies. Passports and visas are among the mundane, if essential, materials required by foreign nationals to enter another country. They are visible manifestations of state control in transnational travel, the paperwork that does boundary work. Daniels’s central point is that scientists and engineers have been singled out for close scrutiny by government authorities not simply because of their possible left-leaning political tendencies but because of the scientific-technological knowledge that they have and might enrich during their visits. Visa controls on scientists and engineers and export controls on knowledge are complementary instruments reinforcing each other to regulate the transnational movement of knowledgeable bodies that were perceived as posing a threat to national security.

Most scholars think of knowledge flows as being restricted primarily by classification or intellectual property laws. Daniels’s chapter emphasizes instead the role of export controls on sensitive, unclassified knowledge as an instrument deployed by the national security state to restrict the freedom of movement across borders. My contribution, chapter 2, extends their field of action to include the regulation of both free trade and academic freedom. It highlights the nature and scope of export controls on the acquisition of tacit and formal knowledge through training and face-to-face interaction in academic and corporate settings from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Violations of these knowledge controls have led to imprisonment for individuals and to heavy fines for high-tech industries. Their importance today is commensurate with the growing concern about the transfer of intangible, tacit knowledge and know-how by firms trading with the communist bloc and by universities that train foreign nationals from countries of concern in their classrooms and laboratories. The recalibration of American power in a new age of globalization, and the rise of China as a major economic and military rival, have led to the quiet but steady expansion of the depth and breadth of the regulatory powers of the US national security state—further fueled and legitimated by the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Part II has five chapters, which deal with knowledge in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In chapter 3 Tiago Saraiva describes the brutal transformation of local patterns of agricultural activity on the fertile Mitidja plains in Algeria by the French colonial government. Large vineyards producing wine and orchards of citrus trees replaced traditional modes of production, transforming thousands of indigenous farmers, herdsmen, and fruit growers into wage laborers. After several efforts to stabilize the quality of citrus fruit sent to metropolitan markets, the head of the colonial botanical service imported and cloned Californian navel oranges produced by cooperatives near Los Angeles. These standardized fruits were successfully grown on small, five- to ten-hectare farms by white settlers (pieds noirs). Saraiva treats these oranges as thick technoscientific things that traveled across the Atlantic along with the social institutions, labor relations, and ideologies of cooperative farming. Modernization in the contact zone between colonial rulers and dominated fellahs was premised on the construction of bonds of solidarity between the French settler elite that rooted them in the soil, unlike the owners of the large wine estates. Decolonization was correspondingly violent: one of the first bombs exploded by Algerian rebels in 1954 was at the Boufarik citrus co-op. The pieds noirs went back to mainland France in the early 1960s when Algeria was granted its independence, going on to form the core of the xenophobic, nationalist right-wing Front National political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his family.

The multiple modernities displayed by the introduction of agricultural equipment into India before and after decolonization are the subject of Prakash Kumar’s chapter. Kumar describes three moments, each employing a different approach to improving agricultural productivity: the use of an immense tractor to replace human and animal labor in preparing fields for planting; the introduction of small-scale, locally produced implements for use on family farms, along with the establishment of a US-inspired training college; and the more familiar use of implements and fertilizers on large farms that were part of what came to be called the Green Revolution. Each of these systems required training in different skills and techniques and was embedded in sets of social relationships among the indigenous farmers themselves and between them and the colonial and postcolonial state. Kumar blurs any teleological account of the much-studied Green Revolution, showing that there were alternative solutions to improving agricultural output that called for different skills and involved different relationships between growers and the state.

In chapter 5 Miriam Kingsberg Kadia deals with social science as an instrument of soft power in the postwar reconstruction of civil society in occupied Japan after World War II. Inspired by a widely acclaimed study by anthropologist Ruth Benedict, American scholars were persuaded that the Japanese were not pathologically deviant—meaning aggressive, authoritarian, rigid, and fearful of dishonor. These academics, some of them no more than ABD (all-but-dissertation) graduate students in sociology, sought not to punish but to refashion by instilling cosmopolitan values of democracy, capitalism, and peace in the new intellectual leaders of the defeated nation. Rather than impose these values arbitrarily from above, they nurtured tendencies already present in the tradition of Japanese social science fieldwork, which encouraged collaborative teamwork. Exhausting expeditions into the countryside, made on behalf of the American Occupation authorities, to study the impact of land reform became direct exercises in democracy, emphasizing egalitarianism and discussion and dissent in the pursuit of objective truths. US Occupation forces and their agents used seminars, language classes, and the distribution of 1.25 million English-language books to local libraries all over the country in an attempt to root out undemocratic, fascist tendencies that could easily spill over into communism. By the mid-1950s most senior Japanese social scientists in academia had been exposed to the